Advances in Katrina Map Technology
Thursday, September 15, 2005
Mapwise, a lot seems to be happening.
First of all, the New Improved! Clickable Depth Map (aka the C&C Technologies New Orleans Flood Map) now has an address field! Hooray! (Now you don't have to go into Goggle Maps first in order to pin-point and address before using the depth map.)
Secondly Microsoft's VirtualEarth has joined the effort. Today I got t his message from a Program Manager:
After the Hurricane, a number of us began a project to show before and after imagery in an effort to help victims discover if their homes are under water. Instead of relying on low res satellite imagery, we worked with a company who specializes in low altitude oblique imagery which gives a MUCH more useful view of the area. Anyway, we just got the results of this effort online yesterday at msnbc. I hope you find it helpful.
I tried the site in both Safari and Firefox (G5 Mac; OSX Tiger). On neither broswer did their aerial photos display properly, although the bugs were different. But the project only launched yesterday, and I could see what they were trying to do, which looks very promising.It might work for you today. Or it might work for you next week when they get a few kinks out of it. Very promising.
UPDATE: My correspondent suggests the following to get around browser incompatibility issues:
Here is an idea since images aren’t displaying for you in the browser properly. At the end of the day, Eagle Eye images are standard JPG images. You can view them in any picture viewer, not just the online viewer we built at MSNBC. If you right click (or whatever the Mac equiv is) on an image that didn’t display, you can see the full URL for the image. You can just enter that URL in your browser to display it. Like this:
http://media.msnbc.msn.com/i/katrina/0914/after/LAORLE011003NeighObliq99N-000.jpg
The image he links to I find quite affecting. The boats look like toys forgotten by careless children, an odd collision in the semantics of scale.
FURTHER UPATE: The folks at Microsoft have volunteer to take care of my current address query load, so current inquries have been passed along to them. I've been working on a bit of a case of eye strain, so it comes at a good time.